YouTube Original Channels boosted with international content

Google has extended its YouTube Original Channels with more than fifty new options, including content from the US and Europe. Launched in late 2011 as a way of highlighting - and more successfully monetizing - original content being created for the YouTube audience, Original Channels has, Google says, been a huge success: 800m viewers watch 4bn hours each month, in fact.

Subscribers, meanwhile, have doubled year-on-year, and individual channels themselves are ramping up more aggressively too. Subscribers hitting 100k per channel is taking place five-times faster than that same milestone two years ago, and the top 25 Original Channels see, on average, more than a million views per week.

The new content includes not only US media but from the UK, Germany, and France, and covers everything from automotive, sports, comedy, news, food, and health. For instance, France's Studio Bagel and Germany's Ponk join the comedy section, while Guinness World Records OMG and the BBC's On Earth both land in Entertainment from the UK.

Cookery content from Jamie Oliver, soccer news from Base79 and Copa90, and Vice's The Creators Project have also been added. There's a full list of all the Original Channels - including the new options - here.